Andy Oakley

Seafair can mean only one thing: the Blue Angels are back in town and they have been roaring over the city all week during practice.

The contrast is delicious: as a city we’re proud to have recently-passed plastic bag ban (which is a good move) and yet today we’ll all gather and watch a fleet of F/A-18s each burn some 1300 gallons of jet fuel for the show along.

(I know that plastic bags are largely made from ethylene, derived from natural gas, and the petroleum by-product used in the process, naphtha, would probably just be flared off otherwise, but still, the ban is more about changing habits to cut down on wanton excess and wasteful habits.)

Bonus fact: Over the course of a year, the Blue Angels use 3.1 million gallons of fuel for transportation, training, shows, etc. Wow.

We had a great dinner last night at the newly opened Olivar restaurant on Capitol Hill.

The food was excellent. A range of small and large plates of French/Spanish descent, with attention to detail in presentation and an assortment of Spanish wines. I particularly enjoyed the arugula, beet and goat cheese salad, the stuffed pork chop and the hanger steak.

Interior decor was a pretty cool, the place was very busy for only its second week and a visit by a visibly-but-not-overtly-proud Chef Thomelin was a nice touch.

(Footnote: I was mistakenly looking for ‘Olivars’ which seems to mean almost nothing on the web)

Seems it’s not only Seattle seeing the rising trend in tagging. The Kirkland Weblog reports an increase on the East side too.

I am impressed that police departments log every reported tagging event. Combined with some local population information, I wonder what some basic data mining might turn up.

Useful links:

• Seattle graffiti reporting hotline. 206-684-7587.
• The Graffiti Nuisance Ordinance ‘encourages the rapid cleanup of graffiti [...] to prevent its spread through the community’

Promotional brochure, 1976, originally uploaded by Seattle Municipal Archives.

Seattle. You’re going to like it a lot.

Digital picture frames are getting cheaper and larger but they still have a way to go in terms of display quality, resolution, size and convenience before I’m going to invest.

Meanwhile, I do have a decent 17″ LCD attached to the wall in the kitchen connected to a PC in the closet. Aside: The massive convenience of a built-in PC in the kitchen was not wholly obvious to me before I installed it but it has since become the most used console in the house.

Rather than a screensaver, I use John’s Background Switcher which is a tool that among other things can be set up to poll Flickr for a set of photos and create various desktop backgrounds from randomly selected ones. Full screen, montages and photo mosaics are simple configuration options apart.

The last trick is a scheduled task that performs the ‘Toggle Desktop’ to minimize all windows after a period of inactivity.

ShowDesktop.scf

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Installation

copy ShowDesktop.scf %systemroot%
schtasks /create /sc onidle /i 15 /tn “Show Desktop” /tr “C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c %systemroot%\ShowDesktop.scf”

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m proud of reading Valleywag on a regular basis. It’s not so much the brainwashed feeling that trashy journalism engenders as it is the wonder of what life would be like with that time instead dedicated to some of the more noble pursuits of western civilization.

Ah yes, time. Perhaps their most valuable contribution is the ‘hundred word version’, an act of distilling down the long, meandering press releases and leaked e-mails into something more readily digestible.

It’s a good thing to remember when writing: if you can say it in 100 words, why use more?

An interesting article in the New York Times this week points:

OPEC 2.0

AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

My recent migration over to WordPress was about the fourth or fifth blogging platform I’ve used in the last eight or nine years. As far as possible I’ve preserved the post content each time I’ve made the move.

For the latest, here’s a quick C# app I wrote to do the transfer. It polls the Windows Live Spaces MetaWeblogAPI to download all of the posts and writes them to a simple text file. Then it republishes those posts by reading them from a file and calling newPost on another blogging service.

The app requires the XML-RPC.NET library and Visual Studio 2008 for compilation.

MetaWeblogBackup